Many homeowners and/or renters park vehicles in garages. In many of these garages, the homeowners can gain entrance to the garage by pressing a button on a garage door opener. To do so, the homeowners often must grab the garage door opener to press the button. Sometimes, however, the garage door opener is not readily accessible and the homeowner must temporarily stop movement of the vehicle and look for the garage door opener. Moreover, the driver must divert his or her attention to grab the garage door opener and press the button. To do so, the driver has to take at least one hand off the steering wheel and redirect his or her attention.
There are some garage door systems in the art that include a transmitter attached to the garage door operator that periodically transmits a beacon signal. The beacon signal includes a unique code or identifier and is received by nearby garage door opener portable transmitters. In the event that the unique code corresponds to a code that has been pre-stored in a memory of the garage door opener portable transmitter, the garage door opener portable transmitter performs an action such as transmitting a control signal to the garage door operator to command the garage door operator to open a garage door. Other systems enable the garage door opener upon detection of the beacon signal so that the user can subsequently press a button to cause the garage door opener to send the control signal to the garage door operator.
Such beacon systems, however, can be expensive and require periodic maintenance. Older operators may not have the beacon generator and will therefore not operate with the automatic portable transmitter. Because such beacon transmitters periodically broadcast the beacon signal, power is wasted when the beacon broadcasts the signal but no garage door openers are nearby to receive the beacon signal.
Moreover, such beacon transmitters broadcast within a spectrum controlled by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”). In the event that the FCC decides to allocate the spectrum utilized by the beacon transmitter to the military or some other entity, for example, the beacon transmitter would have to be reconfigured to transmit at a different frequency. The beacon transmitters also sometimes encounter signal interference because other beacon transmitters nearby can transmit at the same signal frequency.